First Follows: Weird Choices in First Twitter Follows!

Everyone remembers their first. The slow burning excitement.
Wondering with anticipation if your advances will be followed. The
anxiety about whether you’ve chosen the right person. We refer to
the first person you decide to follow on Twitter.

The first follow is a tiny window into a personality. Comedian
Tracy Morgan’s first follow, for instance, was his personal
assistant Kenny Pierce—a fitting choice for a man who needs
supervision.

Gwyneth Paltrow let love be her guide. Her first-follow is
@coldplay, the Twitter account of her husband’s band. Mandy Moore
meanwhile went with producer (and Ryan Adams collaborator) Jamie
Candiloro.

Bill Gates went with the “smart person’s” first follow: He chose
Nick Kristof. Speaking of the Times, Maureen Dowd’s first
follow was Tom Friedman, whose first follow was, you guessed it,
Maureen Dowd. Get a room. Times executive editor Jill
Abramson’s first follow was now-former executive editor Bill
Keller. Bill Keller’s was neither Jill
nor his wife (he got to the bizarre, abandoned account
of former Times spokesperson Catherine Mathis before either
of them!) but ChanRobt, the Tory Anarchist
(whatever that means). All proof that he really is not an expert
regarding Twitter.

Oprah went with an obvious first follow, @AshtonKutcher, and yet
still managed to surprise by not going the self-obsessed route and
choosing @OprahWinfreyNet, or worse, Maya Angelou.

Sasha Grey humiliated herself more than usual and chose
Questlove and Dave Navarro as her first two follows.

One infamous former TV star went with Bob Maron, his “media
advisor” (aka “Tweet writer”) and also a self-proclaimed juggler and
watch salesman.

Conan went the absurd route and chose his solitary first-follow
at random, a 19-year-old girl named Sarah Killen. (“I’ve decided to
follow someone at random,”
wrote O’Brien. “She likes peanut butter and gummy
dinosaurs.”)

The king of self-absorption, Kanye West, fittingly doesn’t
follow anyone. Who has time to monitor a friend feed when you’re
busy tweeting profound stuff like: “No seriously … I said my teeth
are real diamonds… these are not fronts… I replaced my bottom row
of teeth with diamonds.”

The hilariously humorless Vincent Gallo follows no one and is
the author of one solitary tweet.

Account of actor Vincent Gallo. Started account only to stop
impostors. Those interested in my work or communicating go to
vincentgallo.comMon
Apr 04 02:03:43 via webVincent
Gallo
VincentGallo

With the 2012 presidential election not that far away, we’d be
remiss to mention the first-follows of some of the top contenders.
Barack Obama follows thousands of people, so searching for his
first follow will just crash your browser. (Friend-harlot!) The
same is true of Michele Bachmann, but she does follow
@ProfSarahPalin, who is most certainly not Sarah Palin.

TIM PAWLENTY
Pawlenty went with @JasonMattera “NYT bestselling author of OBAMA
ZOMBIES … and Steven Seagal enthusiast.” And then there’s his
number two, “Bunny Ultramod, AKA Max Sparber… member of the pop
punk band The Ultramods.”

RON PAUL
As Ayn Rand is dead, Paul settled on another cold aggregator or
words, @breakingnews. Good Morning America pulls in at number two,
the sensible choice for gold-standard-promoting, intellectual, news
hounds with a taste for witty weathermen banter. Oh, and you knew
there’d be some creepy Aryan publication advocating the four
precepts of libertarianism: stinginess, guns, superiority, and more
stinginess.